In the summer of 2013, a member of a team at X, the moonshot lab then known as Google X, read a scientific paper by Matthew Eisaman, then a researcher at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). It described a way to turn seawater into a carbon-neutral liquid fuel that could replace gasoline. Kathy Hannun volunteered to lead an investigation. Eisaman took leave to join. They called the project Foghorn.
The question was narrow on purpose: could this “sea fuel” come into the world within five to ten years, at a price that could compete with gasoline at the pump?
Before they started, the team wrote down what would make them quit. X calls these kill metrics. Hannun’s team chose cost. At the time, $8 per gallon of gasoline equivalent would have been competitive at the pump in expensive markets like Scandinavia. So the kill metric was a production cost of $5 per gallon equivalent within five years, leaving $3 for distribution, marketing and margin.
The chemistry worked. Working with researchers at PARC, the team pulled carbon dioxide out of seawater, combined it with hydrogen and made methanol, a liquid fuel. But by Hannun’s account, half of the team’s work was cost modeling, and one of its most valuable members was a chemical engineer who had built cost models for oil refineries. The models grew more precise. Making enough fuel meant processing a great deal of seawater, which X’s project page calls “an incredibly expensive process.” A cheap, reliable source of hydrogen, the page says, would take more than five years of research and substantial capital.
The numbers began to look as if they might trigger the kill metric. Hannun later described the pull of the other side: “How do we know that a breakthrough isn’t right around the corner?” In January 2016, after two years of work, the team decided to end Foghorn. “I made the tough call to kill Foghorn,” she wrote. She was disappointed, she added; this was work that had “fully occupied me for two years.”
The team published its research so others could build on it.
A month later, X’s head, Astro Teller, explained to a TED audience how X treats teams that end their own projects. “We work hard at X to make it safe to fail,” he said. Teams that kill their ideas once the evidence is on the table, he said, get applause from their peers, hugs from their manager, promotions. “We have bonused every single person on teams that ended their projects, from teams as small as two to teams of more than 30.”